The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak is doing the greatest disservice to national unity and 55-year Malaysian nation-building by insisting that the Barisan Nasional 13th General Election campaign theme of “Janji Ditepati” (Promises Fulfilled) is adopted as this year’s theme for National Day and Malaysia Day celebrations.

National Day and Malaysia Day should be national occasions where Malaysians, regardless of race, religion, region, class, gender, age and most important of all, political beliefs and affiliations, can come together as Malaysians first and last to celebrate the attainment of Merdeka on August 31, 1957 and the formation of Malaysia on Sept. 16, 1963.

However, when the National Day and Malaysia Day theme this year is the blatant and partisan Barisan Nasional 13GE campaign theme of “Janji Ditepati”, whose dissemination had been spearheaded by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, in a highly politicized tour dubbed “Jelajah Janji Ditepati” all over the country in the past few months, the Barisan Nasional government is deliberately provoking instead of avoiding a national division among Malaysians based on their political beliefs and affiliations on these two national occasions.

JULY 17 — Get ready for the wayang kulit to begin. Elections will be held after Hari Raya, probably in September. And how do I know?

Do I have a crystal ball? Definitely not but Najib Razak is doing what Abdullah Ahmad Badawi did when he also needed a mandate from the voters.

1) Get the authorities to charge a so-called big fish with corruption to show the “government’s resolve” in fighting corruption. Abdullah picked Eric Chia, Kasitah Gaddam, Ramli Yusof and a couple of others. Hey, did anyone remember that everyone was cleared!

Now we are told that ex-Sime Darby CEO is going to be charged with CBT. This case is going to be milked by Najib administration and the MACC, both bodies with little credibility. Will anyone remember if and when Zubir Murshid is acquitted, the same way that Ramli Yusof was cleared?

2) The Klang Valley water rationing. This must be the only country in the world where some private sector company can decide it wants to ration water and where the corrupt and imbecile mainstream media goes on a rampage again the state government which will not give in to blackmail and threats. Read the rest of this entry »

JULY 17 — I have previously written about the housing situation in Penang, in which there is a stark mismatch between supply and demand. This mismatch takes the form of an oversupply of housing stock at both the lowest and highest range of income earners, while there is an undersupply at the middle-income range.

For the bottom 40 per cent of income earners, the number of affordable housing stock doubles the number of families at that income range. At the opposite end, there are more luxury residential developments compared to the number of households at the highest income bracket, though this represents a completely different problem altogether.

However, the real problem of housing in Penang is the unavailability of housing stock to supply the middle-income earners. Currently, there is a shortage of 70,052 units for this group of typically newly-wed professionals and young middle-class families.

This glaring affordability gap threatens to be a serious problem, especially considering the fact that Penang is a middle-income state with a higher-than-national average mean household income of RM4,407 per month. Read the rest of this entry »